You can find this paper here. There is also a shorter version of the paper available here. Governments around the world spend an estimated US$9.5 trillion on goods and services each year. This accounts for roughly one third of government expenditures (29.1% on average in OECD countries) and 10% to 20% of total gross domestic product (“GDP”) in many nations. Furthermore, public procurement is an essential input to the delivery of broader public services and functions of government that are vital for growth, development and social welfare. The special procedures that characterise public procurement are necessary in light of the principal-agent problem and moral hazards that public procurement entails. Conventional responses to the problems of corruption and supplier collusion in public procurement comprise two broad sets of tools. The first, focusing on corruption issues, involves measures to increase the transparency of public procurement and to strengthen the accountability of responsible public officials for malfeasance. The second, aimed at preventing supplier collusion,…

This working paper is available here. A summary version, called ‘New Research on the Effectiveness of Bidding Rings: Implications for Competition Policies’ (2019) CPI Antitrust Chronicle April, can be found here but I have to say I found this shorter version to be slightly confusing, so I would advise you to read the longer paper. There seems to be a consensus that bid rigging is more harmful and deserving of higher penalties than ordinary price fixing violations. Reflecting this, there is empirical evidence that antitrust penalties are more severe for rings than for classic price-fixing cartels. A number of jurisdictions, such as Germany and Italy, impose criminal liability only for bid rigging infringements, but not for other types of cartel. Multilateral organisations, such as the OECD and the International Competition Network, have given special attention to the problems of enforcement against bid rigging. Yet, this antipathy toward bid rigging relative to the more common form of collusive conduct (classic price…

I highly recommend this paper, available here. I was unable to review it on time, in part because it is long, demanding and comprehensive, as is often the case with Ioannis’ papers. If you are unable to read this 93-page primer, many of the main points are neatly summarised in this video interview Ioannis gave at the OECD. If you have a bit of time, I suggest you read the discussion of the various potential competition concerns raised by the blockchain from an EU law perspective in the paper’s last 25 pages or so (starting on page 65).

This note, available here, describes the first ever blockchain antitrust case. In December 2018, UnitedCorp, a diversified technology company, sued Bitmain, the largest Bitcoin mining pool, in the first blockchain dispute with a focus on antitrust (United American Corp. v. Bitmain, Inc. Complaint). The case, pending before the District Court for the Southern District of Florida, is at its core a familiar collusion claim. The facts and allegations are as follows. UnitedCorp offers a number of blockchain solutions. These include BlockNum, which allows the execution of blockchain transactions using regular phone numbers; and BlockchainDome, a cryptocurrency mining system that uses the heat generated from the mining process to heat greenhouses for agricultural purposes. Both technologies rely on a cryptocurrency called Bitcoin Cash, one of the hundreds of publicly available (permissionless) cryptocurrencies. As with other cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin Cash’s whitepaper and protocols set out its rules and governance. In November 2018, protocol developers disagreed on how to update Bitcoin Cash’s protocols. This resulted…

A number of laws and regulations, such as antitrust laws and financial regulations, are informed by the relative economic size of the companies or assets under investigation. For the blockchain, this means that cryptoassets – i.e. digital instruments of economic value that are developed and traded on blockchain networks (e.g. cryptocurrencies, tokenised securities, crypto-derivatives, etc.) – with larger market shares are likelier targets for law enforcement or regulation. Properly measuring the economic footprint of cryptoassets becomes imperative. However, measuring the relative economic size of cryptoassets has proven challenging for multiple reasons. This paper. available here, presents the first systematic examination of the economic footprint of cryptoassets and their constituent actors, with the goal of providing comprehensive guidance into the size of the crypto-economy. The article proceeds in three steps: Part II explains the function and challenges of market share calculation. While some rules and obligations apply uniformly across industries, many are contingent on the relative size of the regulated subjects, meaning that smaller…

This article, available here, introduces the first taxonomy of collusion on the blockchain. It explores the functioning, robustness and limits of such collusive practices, and highlights how companies may use smart contracts and sophisticated algorithms to collude in the blockchain environment. An introductory section describes blockchain technology and its potential uses. A blockchain is an open and distributed ledger recording all sorts of transactions between users. Consensus mechanisms are used to make sure that information and transactions are recorded on the blockchain. This, in turn, means that data and records on the blockchain cannot be easily modified, which in turn breeds trust. Blockchains assign three different roles to their users. Blockchain users may read the information on the blockchain, propose new transactions and validate the blocks. On public (“permissionless”) blockchain, all users can read and propose new entries into the blockchain. Block validation is restricted to some users only, following a consensus mechanism. On private (“permissioned”) blockchains, all three actions can…

This piece, available here, explores a number of (EU) antitrust issues that may arise in the context of blockchains. It is structured as follows: The paper starts by explaining what the blockchain is and what it can do. The blockchain is a technology that uses a software protocol based on cryptography to keep exchanges secure. It allows anybody in the chain to see all transactions on it, removes the need for trusted intermediaries keeping a transaction ledger, and ensures that the transaction ledger is immutable and very hard to tamper with. Blockchains can be divided into open and permissioned networks. Open (i.e. public) networks are accessible to anyone, so that the database is truly public information. This is the case of the blockchains underlying Bitcoin and Ethereum. Permissioned (i.e. private) networks make access conditional upon authorisation by the owner or owners of the network. An example of a permissioned network is Corda, a distributed ledger platform designed specifically for financial institutions to…

This paper, available here , argues that important competition concerns arise from the use of consensus mechanisms in blockchains. Under such mechanisms, new information is only added to the database if the majority of network participants, the ‘nodes’, agree to do so. This requires coordination between the various network participants, which raises questions regarding whether and to what extent this voting behaviour is anticompetitive. The paper also discusses what type of measures may be adopted to ensure that a blockchain complains with competition law by design. It is structured as follows: Its second section provides the legal background for concerns about the functioning of consensus mechanisms. Information may be exchanged between competitors in a blockchain that would otherwise have remained undisclosed to the participating companies or the public. In some cases, public disclosure or selective disclosure of certain information may have procompetitive effects, e.g. when information is aggregated and contributes to greater price transparency so that customers can make more informed decisions, thus…

This paper’s basic argument is that the blockchain holds both promises and threats for antitrust. There is reason to think that the decentralised nature of some blockchain implementations may reduce the need for antitrust enforcement, as it prevents the accumulation of market power by digital platforms. But there is also reason to believe that the technology may pose practical challenges for antitrust enforcement. Antitrust law is set up on the premise that there is a clearly demarcated firm (or set of firms) that may try to seek market power. The decentralised nature of the technology means that identifying an entity to prosecute or hold responsible for any degree of market power (or its abuse) is impossible, and that collusion and price setting between competitors may be harder to detect. The paper begins by describing the blockchain, and why it should matter for antitrust. From an economics perspective, an implementation of blockchain technology has two key characteristics: (i) a set of…

The paper, which can be found here, identifies a number of areas where competition law may intervene in the blockchain sphere, and discusses what the best approach to problems in this area are. One of the authors spoke at the OECD on the blockchain – you can see the video here. The paper is structured as follows: It begins with a short introduction to the blockchain technology. The paper reviewed above provides a much more detailed intro into the topic than this paper, so I am not going to repeat it here. Section III then looks at the interplay between blockchain and competition law. It starts by recalling that competition law provisions apply to undertakings. From a competition law perspective, the blockchain landscape of today is analogous to that of search engines, e-commerce platforms and algorithms in the 1990s. Ten years ago, no one thought that competition law authorities would focus their enforcement priorities on these applications, triggering investigations…